Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss, (born November 11, 1904, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died November 15, 1996, New York, New York), former U.S. State Department official who was convicted in January 1950 of perjury concerning his dealings with Whittaker Chambers, who accused him of membership in a communist espionage ring. His case, which came at a time of growing apprehension about the domestic influence of communism, seemed to lend substance to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s sensational charges of communist infiltration into the State Department. It also brought to national attention Richard M. Nixon, then a U.S. representative from California, who was prominent in the investigation that led to the indictment of Hiss.

Hiss was a graduate of Johns Hopkins University (A.B., 1926; Phi Beta Kappa) and of Harvard Law School (1926–29) and was law clerk (1929–30) to Supreme Court JusticeOliver Wendell Holmes. In 1933 he entered government service in Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and served successively in the Departments of Agriculture, Justice, and State. He attended the Yalta Conference (1945) as an adviser to Roosevelt and later served as temporary secretary-general of the United Nations (San Francisco Conference). In 1946 he was elected president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a position he held until 1949.

In 1948 Chambers, a self-professed former courier for a communist underground “apparatus” in Washington, D.C., accused Hiss of having been a member of the same “apparatus” before World War II. Hiss denied the charge, which was originally made before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When Chambers repeated the charge publicly, away from the House committee chamber where his words were protected by congressional immunity, Hiss sued him for slander. On December 6, 1948, the House committee released sworn testimony by Chambers that Hiss had provided him (Chambers) with certain classified State Department papers for transmission to a Soviet agent. Hiss promptly denied the accusation “without qualification.” In a federal grand-jury investigation of the case, both Chambers and Hiss testified; and Hiss was indicted on December 15 on two charges of perjury, specifically charging that Hiss lied both when he denied that he had given any documents to Chambers and when he testified that he did not talk to Chambers after January 1, 1937. Arraigned, Hiss pleaded not guilty. Hiss’s first trial in 1949 ended in a hung jury. In the second trial, which ended early in 1950, he was found guilty. At both trials Chambers’s sanity was a prominent issue. After serving more than three years of a five-year prison sentence, Hiss was released in 1954, still asserting his innocence. During the following decades the issue of Hiss’s guilt was kept open by outspoken defenders, principally from the American political left, who consistently maintained that he had been unjustly convicted.

Discussion of the perjury trials and conviction of Alger Hiss and excerpts from a post-trial interview with Hiss.Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

In 1992 Hiss asked Russian officials to check the newly opened archives of the former Soviet Union for information pertaining to the case. Later that year General Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a historian and chairman of the Russian government’s military intelligence archives, announced that a comprehensive search had revealed no evidence that Hiss had been involved in a Soviet spy ring. Many scholars, however, doubted that any search could divulge all the secrets of the complex Soviet intelligence operation—Volkogonov’s search did not include Soviet military intelligence files—and therefore felt that the question of Hiss’s innocence remained unresolved. In 1996 the release of secret Soviet cables that had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence during World War II provided strong evidence for Hiss’s guilt.